I climbed out of the car, grinning beneath my helmet, and threw a cursory wave to the crowd. I shook Mahoney and Clayton’s hands, waited for Clayton to finish his interview, and then stepped up, obediently, for my own. I answered the reporter’squestions with a few one-word answers and wondered if, somewhere, Jacob was watching.
For the next four hours, I went from press conference to team debrief to press conference again. By the time I got to check my phone again, it was past six. I had one missed text from a number I didn’t recognize. My stomach tightened in anticipation.
Second place? I thought I said to impress me.
I grinned stupidly at the screen, then looked at the timestamp. He’d only sent it a minute ago. Biting my lip, I started typing an answer, then promptly deleted it. I made five or six false starts, cursing my own inability to come up with anything clever when it mattered.
I was about to give up when three dots appeared on the screen. He was typing something.
You could ask what would impress me,he prompted me.
Heart pounding, I snatched a breath.
What would impress you?I typed.
Three dots appeared instantly. I grinned at my phone, glad that no one could see me behind the walls of my room. When his answer appeared, all the air rushed out of my lungs.
Hotel Hofwirt, room 723. Nine o’clock.
I didn’t make it back to my own hotel room until eight p.m., and by that time, I’d worked myself into something of a frenzy. I jumped into the shower as soon as I got home and scrubbed the day’s dirt and sweat from my skin. Afterward, I spent a humiliatingfive minutes staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, wondering what people saw when they looked at me. Wondering what Jacob might see. It had never occurred to me to wonder if I was good-looking before. It had never mattered, so I’d never cared. But right then, it seemed like there were a hundred things I should’ve paid attention to before.
Over the next twenty minutes, I filled my Google search history with the most embarrassing things I’d ever typed, starting with “Travis Keeping Formula 1 driver handsome”—which turned out to be quite reassuring—all the way down to “first time gay sex”—which was far less reassuring. Twice, I picked up my phone to text Jacob and cancel, but both times I thought of the smell of his skin and the strong lines of his forearms, and I put the phone down again.
I got stuck in traffic and arrived at the hotel twenty minutes late. I pulled my baseball cap down over my head as I crossed the lobby and found the elevators. I scrubbed my palms over my jeans as I rode up to the seventh floor. Fuck, but I was nervous. Really, really nervous. I tried to reassure myself that, as a fellow driver, Jacob would have just as much to lose as I would if this got out. Still, as I raised my hand to knock on door 723, my stomach was in knots.
Someone laughed loudly behind the door. In fact, there were several voices echoing from inside. I was double-checking the room number in my texts, certain I was at the wrong room, when the door swung open. Jacob looked surprised to see me, his eyes widening for a moment before he gave me the most devastating smile.
“Well, well,” he said. “You came. Iamimpressed.”
I glanced behind him. There were at least ten people in the room, all of them smiling or laughing or pouring drinks. In achair near the door, a girl was sitting on some guy’s lap. I vaguely recognized him as one of the other Formula 2 drivers.
Jacob followed my gaze. “C’mon in,” he said. “We’re playing a drinking game.”
I stared at him for five whole seconds, feeling like I’d missed a step coming downstairs.
I felt so stupid for thinking—for imagining—
I remembered my Google searches and my cheeks burned red-hot.
But I could hardly just turn around and leave. Swallowing hard, I followed Jacob inside.
“Guys, we’ve got a straggler,” Jacob announced. “Poor F1 drivers have no fancy parties of their own to go to, so they’re stuck crashing ours.”
He raised a glass to someone in the corner as he said it, and I recognized another face—another F1 driver, Josh Fry. He drove for Torrent Racing, and at the time, he was something like sixteenth in the championship. My stomach dropped even further to the ground. I couldn’tbelieveI’d been so stupid.
The hotel room was pretty small, and filled with more people than I’d initially thought. There were probably twenty people, and most of them looked half wasted already, including Josh Fry.
“Travis Keeping, as I live and breathe!” he said. He held his glass up to me, sloshing liquor onto a pretty girl’s dress. She laughed and smacked him across the head. “Grab a drink, mate.”
“The bar’s out on the balcony,” Jacob told me. Then he picked a drink up off the television stand and turned away to talk to a beautiful red-headed girl in a sparkly gold dress. He must’ve said something funny, because she laughed and hit him on the arm. Her fingers lingered on his skin a half second longer than the action required.
Fuck.
I went out onto the balcony alone and found the bar, which was just a table covered in half-empty liquor bottles and plastic cups. I filled a cup with soda. I didn’t really drink much back then, though that night seemed like it would be a good time to start. Sighing, I threw a few ice cubes into my glass. Just because I’d been an absolute idiot didn’t mean I should make it even worse by getting drunk. I figured I’d just stay for twenty minutes, make up an excuse to leave, and then never think of this humiliating night again.
I was about to turn back inside when the sliding door opened and Jacob stepped out onto the balcony.
“You found the bar,” he said with a grin.
